Saturday 12 October 2013

Malifaux Tournament Musings

So for me Malifaux M2e season kicks off tomorrow with the wonderful Henchman Lees Malifolk M2e.  I've been looking forward to this for a good while and it starts a nice run of 4 tournaments for me running into the Christmas holidays.

One of the things that M2e has done is thrown up all sorts of new tournament possibilities especially around the scheme pool, but that's not what I wanted to talk about in this post, nope what has been occupying a small part of my brain (some folks would probably say a small part of my brain is all i have) is Master / Faction choice.

Most events that I have ever been to are either single Master (i.e you pick your master at the beginning of the event and stick with it) or single Faction.  Both of these work pretty well with Faction seemingly being the preferred choice as even in M2e some masters are better in certain matchups than others - in fact the whole guild faction seems to be built around this (Perdita being anti Neverborn, Sonnia anti Arcanist etc.)

However it occurred to me that this doesn't actually match how most folks I know build their collection of models / crews.  In my experience its the masters that bring people into the game and folks like building crews that work well with that master, rather than looking at factions as a whole.  So in my case for instance I love McMourning but really the other Resser masters don't do anything for me.  Now I can go to a tournament, declare Ressers and just use McM all the time but what about my other Masters that are in different factions? - Misaki I am looking at you.

What I am thinking about is a tournament where you declare 3 Masters who can be from completely different factions and you have free reign to play any of those masters in any game (no being forced to use all 3 or any nonsense like that)  If only I was running a tournament where I could try that format out?

EDIT - After talking with Joel '300' Henry I thought I should amend the post slightly to make it clear that if you took a potential duel faction master then you would have to declare what faction they were being used as when you signed up with the master, no getting 6 factions out of 3 masters thank you very much :)

Now if I remember correctly the last Malifaux masters used a similar system (it may have been fixed list as well) and that not only posed some very interesting challenges for the players but it also seemed to go down very well with them.

So what do you think?  An idea worth pursueing or trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist?